MindmapIt is nearly impossible to learn a new word like this:

legislation

alone. With no definition, context or relationships it is meaningless. You can make word maps to help you remember and understand new words better. Using word maps develops a thinking habit: it helps you remember new words as a part of a meaningful, memorable network. If you do it enough, soon you will think of words in this way naturally and your understanding and command of English will improve.

There are several ways you can arrange your word maps:

Morphological Word Maps

You can make word maps based on a word and its morphology, or structure. If we take our example from above, then you would get a result like this:

This will help you to remember these five word by seeing that they are all legislat~ followed by different suffixes (all of which you might already know). So five 'new' words is really just one new root and five suffixes you already knew.

Word Maps by Theme

Another approach is to think of the connections between words based on a theme: like 'my job', or, in our example, 'law'. That might then produce a word map like this one:

This is just the start of a good word map. The great thing about using an online tool like mindmeister is that you can save your mind maps and add to them later, and everything will rearrange itself nicely!

Word Maps of Idioms

Another excellent way to create a word map is with idioms, proverbs and cliches based on a theme. Let's choose "time". Using Answers.com you can find a whole lot of idioms on a theme. Search for your key word and work down the page until you find the heading "Idioms". The result is this:

Native speakers have all these sorts of relationships in mind when they think of a word. They are just different dimensions or sides to a word. Try this technique to deepen your understanding of vocabulary and build your knowledge.